reconciling the people in any degree to the present state of things was the
execution of some brilliant achievement which should flatter their national
vanity and kindle their ambition or lead to the acquisition of spoil
sufficiently considerable to afford some sensible assistance in supporting
the war. A descent on Holland was therefore resolved on, or, if that were
found impracticable, it was proposed to intercept the Indian fleet, whose
arrival was hourly expected. With this view a formidable fleet of one
hundred fifty sail made its appearance in the Texel, and was met by De
Ruyter about five miles from the village of the Helder. The Dutch, though
far inferior in number, having only seventy-five vessels, convinced
that this struggle was to be the most desperate and the last, prepared
themselves for it as men who had everything at stake. After a short but
inspiring harangue, De Ruyter gave the signal for attack. As if with a
presentiment that long years would elapse before they should again try
the strength of each other's arm, the English and Dutch seemed mutually
determined to leave upon the minds of their foes an ineffaceable impression
of their skill and prowess.
All the resources which ability could suggest or valor execute were now
employed. Each admiral engaged with the antagonist against whom it had
before been his fortune to contend. De Ruyter attached himself to the
squadron of Prince Rupert; Tromp attacked Sprague, who commanded the blue
flag; while Bankert was opposed to the French; the latter, however, after
a short skirmish on the part of Rear Admiral Martel, who was unacquainted
with the secret orders given to the commander, D'Estrées, dropped off to a
distance; nor could all the signals made by Prince Rupert induce them to
take any further share in the fight. Bankert, therefore, joined De Ruyter,
who was engaged in a terrific contest with the squadron of Prince Rupert.
The firing was kept up for several hours without cessation; the discharges
from the cannon of the Dutch vessels being, it was said, as rapid as those
of musketry, and in proportion of three to one to those of the enemy.
Tromp, whose actions always reflected more honor on his courage than
conduct, separated himself, as was his custom, from the remainder of the
fleet, and pressed forward into the midst of the enemy.
He had sustained a continued cannonading from the vessel of Sprague for
upward of three hours, without a single one of his crew being wounded, when
De Ruyter, who had forced Prince Rupert to retire, came to his assistance.
The Prince, on the other side, joined Admiral Sprague, and the fight was
renewed with increased ardor. The vessel of Tromp was so damaged that he
was obliged to remove his flag on board of another; Sprague was reduced to
a similar necessity of quitting his ship, the Royal Prince, for the St.
George, which, ere long, was so much disabled that he was obliged to
proceed to a third; but the boat in which he was passing being struck by a
cannon-ball, sank, and himself and several others were drowned. Toward the
close of evening one English man-of-war was on fire, and two foundered. Not
a single ship-of-war was lost on the side of the Dutch, but both fleets
were so much damaged as to be unable to renew the engagement on the next
morning. Each side, as usual, returned thanks for the victory, to
which, however, the English failed to establish their claim, neither by
accomplishing the projected invasion or intercepting the East India fleet,
the whole of which, except one vessel, reached the ports in safety.
In the more distant quarters of the world the war was carried on with
various success. The French captured the ports of Trincomalee, in Ceylon,
and St. Thomas, on the coast of Coromandel--which were, however, recovered
in the next year--and made an unsuccessful attempt on Curajao. The English
possessed themselves of the island of Tobago and seized four merchantmen
returning from India. But, on the other hand, the States' admiral,
Evertson, made himself master of New York, and, attacking the Newfoundland
ships, took or destroyed no less than sixty-five, and returned to Holland
laden with booty.
The King of France, meanwhile, well satisfied to have secured at so easy
a rate a powerful diversion of the forces of Holland, and the mutual
enfeebling of the two most formidable maritime powers of Europe, cared
little how the affairs of his ally prospered, so that he had been enabled
to pursue the career of his conquests on land. Marching in person at the
head of his troops he laid siege to Maestricht, a town famous for its
gallant defence against the Duke of Parma in 1579, but which now,
notwithstanding several brisk and murderous sallies, capitulated in less
than a month. With this achievement the campaign of Louis ended. The
progress of his arms, and the development of his schemes of ambition had
now raised him up a phalanx of enemies, such as not even his presumption
could venture to despise. He had planned and executed his conquests in full
reliance on the cooperation or neutrality of the neighboring powers, and
found himself in no condition to retain them in defiance of their actual
hostility. He had, from the first, been strongly advised by Condé and
Turenne to destroy the fortifications of the less important towns,
retaining so many only of the larger as to insure the subjection of the
provinces. He had, however, deemed it more consonant to his "glory" to
follow the advice of Louvois in preserving all his conquests entire,
and had thus been obliged to disperse a large portion of his army into
garrisons, leaving the remainder, thinned, moreover, by sickness and
desertion, wholly insufficient to make head against the increasing number
of his opponents. He therefore came to the mortifying resolution of
abandoning the United Provinces, the possession of which he had anticipated
with so much pride.
This auspicious dawn of better fortunes to the provinces was followed by
the long and ardently desired peace with England. The circumstances of the
last battle, in which, as the English declared, "themselves, and the Dutch
had been made the gladiators for the French spectators," had more than
ever disgusted that nation with the alliance of an ambitious and selfish
monarch, who, they perceived, was but gratifying his own rapacity at the
expense of their blood and treasure. Spain had threatened a rupture with
England unless she would consent to a reasonable peace; and even Sweden
herself had declared, during the conferences at Cologne, that she should be
constrained to adopt a similar course if the King of France persisted in
extending his conquests. Should a war with these nations occur, the English
saw themselves deprived of the valuable commerce they carried on in their
ports, to be transferred, most probably, to the United Provinces; in
addition to which consideration, their navigation had already sustained
excessive injury from the privateering of the Zealanders, who had captured,
it is said, no less than twenty-seven hundred English merchant-ships.
These, and various other causes, had provoked the Parliament to use
expressions of the highest indignation at the measures of the court, and to
a peremptory refusal of further supplies for the war unless the Dutch, by
their obstinacy in rejecting terms of peace, should render its continuance
unavoidable.
Aware of this disposition, the States had addressed a letter to the King,
which, with sufficient adroitness, they had contrived should arrive
precisely at the meeting of Parliament, offering the King restitution
of all the places they had gained during the war, and satisfaction with
respect to the flag, or "any other matter they had not already ordered
according to his wishes." This communication, received with feelings of
extreme irritation by the court, had all the effect intended on the House
of Commons. It was in vain that the King complained of the personal insults
offered him by the Dutch; in vain that the chancellor expatiated on their
obstinacy, arrogance, and enmity to the English; and that the court party
remonstrated against the imprudence of exposing England defenceless to
the power of her haughty enemy. The Parliament persisted in refusing the
solicited supply; voted the standing army a grievance; bitterly complained
of the French alliance, and resolved that his majesty should be advised to
proceed in a treaty with the States-General, in order to a speedy peace.
A few days sufficed to accomplish a treaty; the Dutch obviating the
principal difficulty by yielding the honor of the flag in the most ample
manner. They now agreed that all their ships should lower their topsails
and strike the flag upon meeting one or more English vessels bearing the
royal standard, within the compass of the four seas, from Cape Finisterre
to Staaten in Norway, and engaged to pay the King two million guilders for
the expenses of the war.
Shortly after, the Bishops of Muenster and Cologne, alarmed at the
probability of being abandoned by the French to the anger of the Emperor,
who had threatened them with the ban of the empire, consented to a treaty
with the United Provinces, in virtue of which they restored all the places
they had conquered.
%DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI%
LA SALLE NAMES LOUISIANA
A.D. 1673-1682
FRANÇOIS XAVIER GARNEAU[1]
[Footnote 1: Translated by Andrew Bell.]
During the early colonization of New France, in the era of Count Frontenac,
a remarkable spirit of adventure and discovery manifested itself in Canada
among both clerics and laymen. This enterprise, in seeking to open up and
colonize the country, indeed, showed itself under each successive governor,
from the first settlement of Québec, in 1608, down to the fall, in 1759, of
the renowned capital on the St. Lawrence. In the entailed arduous labor,
full as it was of hazard and peril, the pathfinders of empire in the New
World, besides laymen, were largely the Jesuit missionaries.
This spirit of adventure specially began to show itself in the colony at
the period when M. Talon became intendant, when the government of New
France, at the time of Louis XIV's minister, Colbert, became vested
directly in the French crown. Through Talon's instrumentality the colony
revived, and by his large-minded policy its commerce, which had fallen into
the hands of a company of monopolists, was in time set free from many of
its restrictions.
Before Talon quitted the country, he took steps to extend the dominion of
France in the New World toward Hudson's Bay, and westward, in the direction
of the Great Lakes. In 1671 he despatched a royal commissioner to Sault
Ste. Marie, at the foot of Lake Superior, to assemble the Indians of the
region and induce them to place themselves under the protection, and aid
the commerce, of the French King.
While thus engaged, the commissioner heard of the Mississippi River from
the Indians; and Talon intrusted the task of tracking its waters to Father
Marquette and to M. Joliet, a merchant of Québec. With infinite toil these
two adventurous spirits reached the great river they were in search of, and
explored it as far south as the Arkansas. Here unfriendly Indian tribes
compelled them to return, without being permitted to trace the mighty
stream to its outlet. This, however, is supposed to have been accomplished,
in 1682, by Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, a daring young Frenchman,
who descended the Mississippi, it is currently believed, to the Gulf of
Mexico, naming the whole region Louisiana, in honor of Louis XIV.
Whether La Salle actually explored the great river to its mouth is, among
historians, still a moot point. It is supposed that early in his adventures
he retraced his steps and returned to Canada, where, as well as in France,
he had numerous detractors, among whom was De la Barre, the then Governor
of New France. It is known that he was soon again in Québec, to meet his
enemies, which he did successfully, after which he proceeded to France.
Here he was royally received by the King, and, as a proof of the monarch's
confidence in him, La Salle was intrusted with the command of a colonizing
expedition which was sent to Louisiana by sea.
This expedition never reached its destination, for differences with the
commander of the vessels (Beaujeu) interfered with the direction of the
expedition. The mouths of the Mississippi, it seems, were passed, and
the ships reached the coast of Texas. Disaster now dogged the leader's
footsteps, for Beaujeu ran one of the ships on the rocks, and then deserted
with another. La Salle and some of his more trusty followers were left to
their fate, which was a cruel one, for disease broke out in the ranks, and
famine and savage foes made havoc among the survivors. His colony being
reduced to forty persons, La Salle set out overland with sixteen men for
Canada to procure recruits. On the way his companions mutinied, put
La Salle to death, and but a handful of the party reached Canada, the
remainder perishing in the wilderness.
Were we to express in the briefest of terms the motives which induced the
leading European races of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who came
to the Americas, we should say that the Spaniards went thither in quest of
gold, the English for the sake of enjoying civil and religious freedom, the
French in view of propagating the Gospel among the aborigines. Accordingly,
we find, from the beginning, in the annals of New France, religious
interests overlying all others. The members of the Society of Jesus,
becoming discredited among the nations of Europe for their subserviency to
power--usually exalting the rights of kings, but at all times
inculcating submission, both by kings and their subjects, to the Roman
pontiffs--individual Jesuits, we say, whatever may have been their demerits
as members of the confraternity in Europe or in South America, did much to
redeem these by their apostolic labors in the wilderness of the northern
continent; cheerfully encountering, as they did, every form of suffering,
braving the cruelest tortures, and even welcoming death as the expected
seal of their martyrdom for the cause of Christ and for the advancement of
civilization among barbarous nations.
From Québec as a centre-point the missionary lines of the Jesuit fathers
radiated in all directions through every region inhabited by our savages,
from the Laurentian Valley to the Hudson's Bay territory, along the
great-lake countries, and down the valley of the Mississippi. Scantily
equipped, as it seemed to the worldly eye, with a breviary around the neck
and a crucifix in hand, the missionary set forth, and became a pioneer
for the most adventurous secular explorers of the desert. To such our
forefathers owed their best earliest knowledge of vast regions, to whose
savage inhabitants they imparted the glad tidings of the Gospel, and
smoothed the way for native alliances with their compatriots of the laity,
of the greatest after-import to the colony.
Such devotedness, at once heroic and humble, could not but confound worldly
philosophy, while it has gained for the members of the order the admiration
of many Protestants. Thus we have the candid testimony of Bancroft, the
able historian of the English plantations in this continent, that "The
annals of missionary labors are inseparably connected with the origin of
all the establishments of French America. Not a cape was doubled nor a
stream discovered that a Jesuit did not show the way."
On the other hand, there were instances where secular explorers, seeking
to illustrate their names by great discoveries or to enrich themselves by
traffic, opened a way for the after-labors of the missionary. The most
celebrated of such were Champlain, Nicolet, Perrot, Joliet, La Salle, and
La Verendrye.
In regions south of the St. Lawrence, Père Druillettes was the first
European who passed overland from that river to the eastern Atlantic
seaboard, ascending the Chaudifere and descending the Kennebec in 1646. He
did good service to the colony by preserving for it the amity of that brave
nation, the only one which the Iroquois were slow to attack.
In another direction, the traffickers and missionaries, constantly moving
onward toward the sources of the St. Lawrence, had reached the upper
extremity of Lake Huron. Pères Brébeuf, Daniel, Lalemant, Jogues, and
Raimbault founded in the regions around its waters the Christianized
settlements (_villages_) of St. Joseph, St. Michel, St. Ignace, and Ste.
Marie. The last-named, seated at the point where Lake Huron communicates
with Lake Erie, was long the central point of the northwestern missions.
In 1639 Jean Nicholet, following the course of a river flowing out of Lake
Michigan at Green Bay, was led within three days' navigation of "the
Great Water," such was the distinctive name the aborigines gave to the
Mississippi. In 1671 the relics of the Huron tribes, tired of wandering
from forest to forest, settled down in Michilimackinac, at the end of Lake
Superior, under the care of Père Marquette, who thus became the earliest
founder of a European settlement in Michigan. The natives of the vicinity
were of the Algonquin race; but the French called them _Sauteurs_, from
their being near to Sault Ste. Marie.
Between the years 1635 and 1647 communication with the region was little
attempted, the hostile feeling of the Iroquois making the navigation of
Lake Ontario perilous to adventurers, and obliging them to pass to and
from the western mission field by the valley of the Ottawa. The Neuters'
territory, visited by Champlain, and the southern lakeboard of Erie beyond
Buffalo, were as yet almost unknown.
The new impulse which had been given to Canada by Colbert and Talon began
to bear fruit. Commerce revived, immigration increased, and the aborigines,
dominated by the genius of civilization, feared and respected everywhere
the power of France. Perrot, a famous explorer, was the first European who
reached the end of Lake Michigan and the Miâmis country, where deputies
from all the native tribes of the regions irrigated by the head waters
of the Mississippi, the sources of the Red River and the St. Lawrence,
responded to his call to meet him at the Sault Ste. Marie, From one
discovery to another, as so many successive stages in a journey, the French
attained a certainty that "the Great Water" did exist, and they could, in
advance, trace its probable course. It appeared certain, from the recent
search made for it in northerly and eastern directions, that its waters, so
voluminous as the natives asserted, must at last find their sea-vent either
in the Bay of Mexico or in the Pacific Ocean. Talon, who took a strong
interest in the subject, during his intendancy recommended Captain Poulet,
a skilful mariner of Dieppe, to verify the passage from sea to sea, through
the Straits of Magellan.
He induced M. de Frontenac to send M. Joliet into the region where the
great stream, yet unseen, must take its rise; and follow its course, if
found, till its waters reached the sea. The person thus employed on a
mission which interested everyone at the time was a man of talent, educated
in the Jesuits' College of Québec, probably in view of entering the Church,
but who had gone into the peltry trade. He had travelled much in the
countries around Lake Superior and gained great experience of the natives,
especially those of the Ottawa tribes. M. Joliet and Père Marquette set out
together in the year 1673. The latter, who had lived among the Potowatami
Indians as a missionary, and gained their affections, was forewarned by
them of the perils, they alleged, which would beset his steps in so daring
an enterprise, admonishing him and his companion that the people of the
farther countries would allow no stranger to pass through them; that
travellers were always pillaged at the least; that the great river swarmed
with monsters who devoured men,[1] and that the climate was so hot that
human flesh could not endure it.
[Footnote 1: There was some foundation for this report, as alligators
abounded, at that time, in the lower waters of the river.]
Having progressed to the farthest horde, over the Fox River, where Père
Allouez was known, and the extremest point yet touched by any European,
the adventurers found the people of the divers tribes living together in
harmony; viz., the Kikapoos, Mascoutins, and Miâmis. They accorded the
strangers a kind reception and furnished guides to direct the party, which
was composed of nine persons in all--Joliet, Marquette, with five other
whites, and two natives. On June 10th they set out, bearing two light
canoes on their shoulders for crossing the narrow portage which separates
the Fox River from that of Wisconsin, where the latter, after following a
southerly, takes a western, course. Here their Indian guides left them,
fearing to go farther.
Arrived at the Lower Wisconsin they embarked and glided down the stream,
which led the travellers through a solitude; they remarking that the levels
around them presented an unbroken expanse of luxuriant herbage or forests
of lofty trees. Their progress was slow, for it was not till the tenth day
that they attained the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi. But the
goal was surely, if tardily, attained. They were now floating on the bosom
of the "Father of Waters," a fact they at once felt assured of, and fairly
committed themselves to the course of the doubled current. This event
constituted an epoch in American annals.
"The two canoes," says Bancroft, "with sails outspread under a new sky,
sped their way, impelled by favoring breezes, along the surface of the calm
and majestic ocean tributary. At one time the French adventurers glided
along sand-banks, the resting-places of innumerable aquatic birds; at
others they passed around wooded islands in midflood; and otherwhiles,
again, their course lay through the vast plains of Illinois and Iowa,
covered with magnificent woods or dotted with clumps of bush scattered
about limitless prairie lands."
It was not till the voyagers had descended sixty leagues of the great
stream that they discovered any signs of the presence of man; but at
length, observing on the right bank of the river a foot-track, they
followed it for six miles, and arrived at a horde _(bourgade),_ situated on
a river called by the natives Moingona, an appellation afterward corrupted
into "Rivière des Moines." Seeing no one, the visitors hollowed lustily,
and four old men answered the call, bearing in hand the calumet of peace.
"We are Illinois," said the Indians: "you are our fellow-men; we bid you
welcome." They had never before seen any whites, but had heard mention
of the French, and long wished to form an alliance with them against the
Iroquois, whose hostile excursions extended even to their country. They
were glad to hear from Joliet that the colonists had lately chastised those
whom no others could vanquish, and feasted the visitors, to manifest their
gratitude as well as respect. The chief of the tribe, with some hundreds of
his warriors, escorted the party to their canoes; and, as a mark of parting
esteem, he presented a calumet, ornamented with feathers of various colors;
a safe-conduct this, held inviolable among the aborigines.
The voyagers, again on their way, were forewarned of the confluence of the
Missouri with the main stream, by the noise of its discharging waters.
Forty leagues lower, they reached the influx of the Ohio, in the territory
of the Chouanows. By degrees the region they traversed changed its aspect.
Instead of vast prairies, the voyagers only saw thick forests around them,
inhabited by savages whose language was to them unknown. In quitting the
southern line of the Ohio, they left the Algonquin family of aborigines
behind, and had come upon a region of nomads, the Chickasaw nation being
here denizens of the forest. The Dacotas, or Sioux, frequented the riverain
lands, in the southern region watered by the great flood. Thus interpreters
were needed by the natives, who wished to parley from either bank of the
Mississippi, each speaking one of two mother-tongues, both distinct from
those of the Hurons and Algonquins, much of the latter being familiar to
Joliet and others of the party.